Last Thursday, The Revealer shared a stage at the Yale Divinity School with a panel of journalists talking about “The Belief Beat.” Among them were Michael Paulson, a member of the Boston Globe team that won a Pulitzer for its coverage of the Catholic Church’s priest problem, and Peter Steinfels, a New York Times “Beliefs” columnist and author of A People Adrift: The Crisis of the...

We suppose it should come as no surprise that The Salt Lake Tribune, using a Combined News Service report, should give bigger play to the latest bit of Paul Bremer‘s diplomatic theology in Iraq, while The New York Times and The Washington Post pay little attention to the issue. Salt Lake City is a town that knows a thing or two about...

“The preaching is Baptist, long and good, about the generations springing up and being cut down like grass. The funeral director, the ‘funeralizer,’ the Gullah say, has the ‘catchers’ — his wife and two male assistants — stationed before the casket. There are eulogies and scattered prayers and finally we join hands for ‘Amazing Grace,’ words from...

The Revealer welcomes some competition in the religion-press-critique business from GetReligion.org, a new blog edited by Doug LeBlanc and written, for the most part, byTerry Mattingly. The two bring an impressive range of experience to the task — LeBlanc, self-described as “a lifelong Episcopalian but also, by choice, an evangelical Protestant,” has edited religion coverage for secular dailies and...

The-God-of-Small-Things is a blog maintained by someone named Bob. As far as we can tell, it has one entry — a rebuke to The Revealer. And we thank Bob for it. The Revealer, writes Bob, focuses on “critiquing the big religion stories, but also miss the small ones.” As evidence of just such a small one — “religion...

The Revealer is delighted to announce that a radio show featuring two associates of the Center for Religion and Media — Ann Pellegrini and Janet R. Jakobsen — is a nominee for aGolden Reel award from the National Federation of Community Broadcasters. Ann and Janet spoke with C.S. Soong, host of “The Living Room,” about their book, Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits...

Maybe religion reporters aren’t so stupid, after all. By Diane Winston I understand Chris Smith’s frustration with the secular media’s coverage of religion (“Religiously Ignorant Journalists”). While Smith was rattled by a Dallas Morning News reporter who called Episcopalians “Episcopals,” I recall an even bigger blooper. A few years back, a Morning News reporter profiled a messianic Jewish congregation...

The Revealer likes to harp on a theme, a rather vague notion of democratic religion writing — the sort practiced by journalists more intrigued by the many manifestations of faith and faithlessness than by Religion’s official proclamations and courtroom exhortations (Stay out of the schools! Get into the schools!). But we’re reminded from time to time...

The other day The Revealer was on a radio show with an otherwise very clever journalist who noted that far more people believe in the virgin birth than believe in evolution. What this was evidence of, the journalist — we’ll leave his or her identity out of this, since the remark was so representative — did not...

Religiously Ignorant Journalists By Christian Smith Today I received a phone message from a journalist from a major Dallas newspaper who wanted to talk to me about a story he was writing about “Episcopals,” about how the controversy over the 2003 General Convention’s approval of the homosexual bishop, Gene Robinson, would affect “Episcopals.” What an...

A Theological Investigation By Jay Rosen “In my view, journalism is a secular enterprise, and there is no specifically Catholic way to do it,” writes John L. Allen Jr, Vatican correspondent for The National Catholic Reporter. “You try to tell the story as best you can, covering the church the way you would City Hall or the White...